Loss of the artful nude

I am a storyteller -- by nature and by profession. It is what I am and what I do.

Truth be told, I have a catalogue of life stories that I regularly mine -- primarily for the benefit of my children, and usually because they contain life lessons I wish to impart. I share this with you now because the subject of this essay is just one of those stories. As is often the case, it might take me a while to get to the point, so I shall not dally any longer.

Shortly after my 17th birthday, I walked into the drug store in the small town where I grew up and began to peruse the magazines on display there. One in particular caught my eye. The photo on the cover was of a comely young lass wearing a T-shirt inscribed with the words, "Student Power." She was pulling up the shirt to reveal her tummy and, enticingly, the lower part of a bare breast. On her tummy was painted the symbol of a bunny head.

Yup, the magazine was Playboy.

In a rare flash of courage, perhaps emboldened by teenage lust, I picked up that September 1969 copy of Playboy and took it to the grandmotherly type behind the counter. She looked at me askance, the way you would envision grandmotherly types looking at you if you were 17 and buying a package of condoms. After all, she knew me, she knew my father, she knew my mother and was certainly more accustomed to me buying a comic book than a girlie magazine. But she rang up the transaction anyway and I left the store with my first Playboy firmly in my grasp.

It was one of those adolescent rites of passage.

To be sure, I was 17 and curious, yet I was not uneducated in the female form. My father kept an old calendar in our basement, by the furnace, that depicted a painting of a young undraped woman who absolutely radiated beauty and grace. My brother and I discovered it quite by accident when we were probably no more than nine or 10, and from time to time we would furtively examine -- study might be the better word -- this fine example of the artful nude.

In retrospect, that is what the photos in Playboy were providing -- artful nudes for the masses. These women were perfect in every respect, thanks to the judicious use of makeup, complimentary lighting and the magic of airbrushing. We knew they weren't real. They were subjects of art -- and we appreciated them as such.

That's why I was in for a bit of a shock the first time I picked up what can only be described as a pornographic magazine. It was at a friend's house a year or two later when most of the kids my age were moving out of their parents' homes and embarking on new lives.

Quite frankly, I was shocked by what I saw. Sure, the girls depicted in those pages were naked, but they weren't nudes if you follow my thinking. They weren't given the benefit of makeup and complimentary lighting. There was no airbrushing. These girls had zits and hair growing in places where maybe it shouldn't be growing. Their teeth weren't perfectly straight. Some weren't even all that pretty. But what was really shocking was what they were doing -- either to some submissive male, or to another female or perhaps to themselves. This wasn't an appreciation of the naked form, I thought. This was a gynecological exam.

There was an artless debasement to be found in these pages that I decided then and there wasn't for me.

Porn was not easily accessible in those days, so a resolution to avoid it was easy to make. Instead, I would continue to be a loyal Playboy reader -- which, ironically, didn't prove too difficult. Once I had brought my first copy home, I rarely had to buy Playboy again. My father, figuring if his kid could buy Playboy, so could he, began to bring home the monthly issue.

But I digress.

Fast forward 40 years. Today's Playboy has lost many of the loyal readers it once enjoyed -- including me, I admit -- and is slowly going broke. I won't be surprised if it fails to survive its iconic founder, Hugh Hefner. Porn, on the other hand -- due largely to the Internet -- is a lot tougher to ignore.

This is worrisome. Playboy in its heyday was the primer for the sophisticated, erudite male. Its pages offered the reader a joyful, albeit hedonistic lifestyle: how to successfully interact with others, how to be polite, what to wear and not wear, what drinks to sample, what music and literature would broaden your horizons, the virtues of personal hygiene. Most important of all, it taught you how to treat women: with class, with dignity, with sensitivity and humour and, yes, with a graceful love. What could be more seductive?

Porn does none of that. Porn is a vulgarity; it might as well depict two dogs fucking.

Yet porn is everywhere.

A friend of mine -- a learned traveller and writer -- says if you click at random on as few as five successive web links, you will end up on a porn site. Enter the name of someone famous in a search engine and you will instantly be given a menu of porn to choose from, even if it is just the famous person's face badly photoshopped onto someone else's body. Believe it or not, there is even cartoon porn these days. Bugs Bunny must spin in his grave.

Non-existent is the porn site that serves up anything remotely approaching an erotic appreciation of nudity as art. Like the mags of the 1970s, what is instead predominant are the graphic gynecological exams. Well, no thanks.

Maybe I feel this way because sometime after my 17th birthday, I turned into an old fart. But I don't think it's as simple as that. I think we have lost something as a society in the past half-century. These days, we have become so desensitized to the stuff that is circulated for mass consumption -- be it on the Internet, in movies, even on television -- that when a graphic account of sexual activity is put on a public platform, people barely notice. Well, maybe they should.

You can learn nothing about healthy relationships from pornography. It will not teach you understanding, empathy, compassion, forgiveness or love. Hell, it won't even teach you technique. All it can show you is humanity in, literally, the worst possible light.

The Playboy bunny, with his devotion to grace, art and the virtues of good lighting, would not understand.